Former Winnebago County Sheriff’s detective remembered

WINNEBAGO — If former Winnebago County Sheriff’s Capt. Gene Coots had one pet peeve that bugged him to no end it was people carelessly leaving the arm up on the office paper cutter.

One day upon seeing the arm in the upright position, “he decided to put on a show,” said Coots’ brother, Lynn. Gene voiced his anger, slammed the arm down and accidentally sliced off a piece of his sports coat.

“The gals in the office were turning blue,” Lynn said. “He told them to go ahead and laugh, and they busted out laughing. And he laughed right along with them.”

Gene could laugh at himself, and he could also solve homicide cases.

Leafing through several old pictures of his big brother on the family dining room table Friday night, Lynn recalled that story and others about the veteran sheriff’s detective who so many in law enforcement still look up to today.

Gene Coots, 80, of Winnebago, died Wednesday in River Bluff Nursing Home after a lengthy illness.

Coots, a Korean War veteran, served more than 30 years with the sheriff’s department before retiring in 1993 as a captain and head of the detective bureau.

Sheriff Dick Meyers and state Rep. Jim Sacia, R-Pecatonica, a former FBI agent, eulogized Coots Monday at his funeral in Winnebago and later spoke of the man nicknamed by friends as “Cooter” and “Columbo.”

“People called him Columbo (a fictional L.A. homicide detective portrayed by Peter Falk in the TV series “Columbo”) because he always had that disheveled look about him,” Meyers said. “If you wanted to know what he had for breakfast, you could just look at his tie.

“But I called him Columbo because he was very intuitive, intelligent and excellent at getting information from people. He had a slow methodical and inquisitive mind.”

Meyers recalled the Aug. 29, 1987, execution-style deaths of Karen Hall, 39, a clerk at SwedishAmerican Hospital, her daughter, Stacy, 15, and son, Jason, 12. All three had their hands and feet tied with rope and were shot in the head inside their Old River Road home.

“The mother watched her kids,” Meyers said.

It was Gene Coots, who in the wee hours of the morning, persuaded a then Rockford-based state crime lab to process various pieces of evidence, including a box of shells with finger prints on them. Within hours of the homicides, lab technicians got a positive match for Danny Ray Johnson. “We had a bunch of veteran detectives, and you could hear the cheers go up,” Meyers said.

Johnson, Hall’s former boyfriend who was served with an order of protection a month earlier, was found six months later in a wooded area in west Rockford deceased from an apparent suicide.

Sacia called Coots, his close friend of 44 years, “an icon” and “one in a million.”

“He was an unbelievably confident investigator, yet he gave such a disheveled appearance. We worked together on numerous bank robberies. He had a unique sense of humor and was unbelievable with people.”

Former Winnebago County State’s Attorney Paul Logli also remembered Coots for his unassuming appearance and sharp mind.

“He had a really good mind for detective work,” he said. “He ran a good detective bureau.”

Upon retirement, Coots worked several years for Sacia at Northern Illinois Tractor & Equipment in Pecatonica. The history buff served on the Midway Village Museum board, assisted the Burritt Museum and served on the board that revived the Trask Bridge Picnic.